They may notice that the two chapters appear at the start and near the end of the book, that both are relatively short, only two pages in length, and that both begin with a structurally similar first line. Within Terese Marie Mailhot’s (Seabird Island Band) Heart Berries: A Memoir there are two chapters with the title “Indian Condition.” A reader may stop to carefully look at the Table of Contents and think to themselves this is interesting, unusual. This post originally appeared on graduate student Stephanie Rico’s Medium. She compares her mother to Eve and then comes to terms with her death by “leaving her body in the dirt” (121).During the fall of 2020, graduate students in the Ryerson University English Department’s Literatures and Modernity program worked on digital criticism projects that reflected on Indigenous literature in Canada and feminist forms of testimony. The memoir ends with a letter from Mailhot to her deceased mother, which speaks frankly about her successes and failures.

At the end of the memoir, Mailhot graduates with her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and reflects on the value of education-not just traditional education, but also the learning that comes from experiencing enormous pain. She openly discusses her bipolar disorder and its effect on her marriage and children.

She also imparts a meta-narrative on the power and limitations of storytelling in Native culture. Mailhot reflects on motherhood as both a mother and a child, and the shame and pride she carries as an Indian woman. She also writes about her first marriage to a man named Vito, who took custody of their first child, Isadore. She focuses one essay on her mother, an activist who sometimes forgot to feed them, and one on her father, an alcoholic artist who sexually abused her as a baby. Throughout these essays, Mailhot recalls her life growing up on the reservation. She and her son Isaiah move in with Casey, and Mailhot gives birth to another son, whom she calls a Thunder Being. During the pregnancy, Mailhot begins an MFA and must go off her bipolar medication, which results in incredible emotional pain.

Mailhot and Casey conceive a child in a pecan field during a particularly difficult period in their relationship. Despite the pain of her hospitalization and abandonment, Mailhot decides to continue her love affair with Casey-at first as a casual lover, and then monogamously. Mailhot records her time in the hospital from the perspective of an Indian woman, whose experience isn’t represented by the rational Western medical system. The beginning of the book chronicles Mailhot’s love affair with a White man named Casey, who leaves her after she checks herself into a psychiatric hospital and is diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar disorder.

Heart berries mailhot